Early April, warmest day this year so far (twenty-three Centigrade,) dry with a slight south-easterly breeze. Wil announced that he wanted to start fishing again, so we left early on Tuesday morning for Hazel Court Ponds, arrived at eight as the ponds opened, and set ourselves a packing-in-time of two in the afternoon, to ease Wil back into things slowly. To make the six hours more interesting we decided on a competition. A point each for first, fish, most fish, and heaviest fish with the loser buying MacDonalds on the way home. Peg number one on the Reed Pond had been good to us in the past, and it had Wi-Fi so we unloaded all the gear out of the car and dumped it at peg one. The umbrella went up with our two canvas chairs inside because I’d decided not to sit on my box, isolated, but to sit with Wil and have a chat, and chat we did for six hours because we couldn’t get the Wi-Fi to work. Wil had two rods with method feeders and pink wafters, while I had one method feeder rod with an

First visit to a new club pond, found it closed so ended up at the old faithful, Dragonfly Pond at Tri-Nant.

Mid-March, cold but dry with a slight easterly breeze. For those that have not read last week’s blog, which is still available, I am at a stage in my angling where I have decided to use my pole, also to be active between swapping swims and feeding them, and to abandon for now the search for larger and larger carp using method feeders or Ronnie rigs and pop-ups. With this in mind, Hazel Court had one of its winter weekends of opening, so on the Sunday I packed the car, headed there, and arrived at eight as the venue was opening. Around ten cars were in the car park with others arriving as I changed into wellies. There seemed to be a scramble to fill the pegs nearest to cars so I loaded my trolly and made the first of two visits to a peg I’d fished before at the far end of the pleasure pond, where I sat alone all day. In the past, I had not used the trolly and Wil and I had made a couple of journeys each, but with Wil taking a break from fishing to concentrate on his stop-motions, hoping

A philosophical couple of weeks for me, wondering which direction my fishing was going (two ways with a great split between them) and trying to work out where I was, where I was going, and where I wanted to go. It all started with a peaceful day’s fishing, on my local Dragonfly Pond, listening to the sheep in the next field, the birds in the trees behind me, and a one-sided conversation between two anglers on the next two pegs to me, the furthest angler being out of my hearing ability. Waggler floats hit the water in two distinct places, followed by catapulted loads of unrecognisable loose bait, this seeming to be in the wrong order, but whatever. “I cannot get my head around it,” one shouted to his mate. “They don’t even have to strike. They are not fishing really, just setting a trap and then sitting about doing nothing to do with fishing, waiting for an alarm to go off to tell them that a carp has hooked itself.” One waggler hit the water again, the bait sank to the bottom, and the

The Tuesday between Christmas and New Year looked okay but cold so we ventured out to Warren Mill with minimal gear and were right to not take too much with us. On arrival and looking over the car park wall, it was obvious that the first half of the mill pond was frozen over. On the right-hand side of the pond, from the ice to the island each peg was occupied by families out to get fresh air, or maybe use new fishing equipment they’d had for Christmas. We walked up to the island and cast, underarm, our huge method feeders some fifteen feet into the area between the bank and the island, with no expectations. When Bampa got bored, he went for a walk to see how far around the island you could get, and on returning he told me this. “Up ahead there’s a bridge across another stream coming into the pond, and after that it’s boggy and you need wellies. After that it becomes difficult and you have to duck under fallen trees before getting to the place where I stopped. I stopped because the path

Background: I fished as a lad, coarse and sea, then, having a teenage grandson who wanted to fish, and in my seventies, I joined him. We lure fished, then we beach-casted, then we coarse fished for silvers, and ultimately found our niche in carp fishing by method feeder and pole in local ponds. Each time we swapped genres of angling, we researched and followed the crowd. This threw up a number of questions that remain to us, unanswered, and we wonder why the following anomalies exist. The strangest thing as far as we are concerned, is the clothing worn by coarse anglers; match anglers, and carp specialists in particular. For reference here, I deem match anglers (and therefore to some extant pleasure anglers, like us) to fish ponds and lakes for all fish, with the match anglers hoping to catch a ten-pound carp at some stage of their match which could boost, or even double, their catch weight. Carp specialists, on the other hand, target carp over twenty pounds and often are not happy unl